This application seeks partial funding for a conference entitled "Virus Assembly" to be held in Saxton's River, Vermont, July 3-8, 2004, under the sponsorship of the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB). The specific aims of the conference are: 1. To create a forum for the interaction of scientists that study all aspects virus assembly, that spans investigator career stage, virus system, and methods of study. The goal is to foster awareness and novel collaborations that would not occur as a result of meetings devoted to a single virus group. Past meetings have had a remarkable record of nucleating collaborations of exceptional value and productivity, as well as significantly influencing the direction of individual experiments based on potential virus analogies, and we wish to encourage this trend. 2. To specifically encourage investigators at the graduate student and post doctoral level to pursue careers that blend methods of chemistry, biophysics and cell biology to understand viral pathogenesis, particularly as it relates to particle entry, disassembly, assembly, maturation and exit. We also seek to encourage discussion of relatively unorthodox applications of virology, as represented at our last meeting by presentations describing plant viruses as scaffolds for nanoelectronics, and animal viruses as platforms for vaccines against infectious diseases and cancer.